National Security Used to Prevent Report on Pedophile Ring

Media outlets about to report on pedophile ring investigations were stopped by claims of national security.

If this hasn’t happened yet on this side of the Atlantic, it is only a matter of time.

Imagine you are a newspaper executive and are given documentary evidence of credible accusations against a high-level pedophile ring that is being investigated. Suddenly, fifteen uniformed policemen and two non-uniformed show up to tell you that you are not permitted to run the story.

The security services are facing questions over the cover-up of a Westminster paedophile ring as it emerged that files relating to official requests for media blackouts in the early 1980s were destroyed.

Two newspaper executives have told the Observer that their publications were issued with D-notices – warnings not to publish intelligence that might damage national security – when they sought to report on allegations of a powerful group of men engaging in child sex abuse in 1984.

The fact that a pedophile ring can’t be reported because it could jeopardize national security is a scandal in itself!

One of those two executives was Dan Hale.

Hale, who was awarded an OBE for his successful campaign to overturn the murder conviction of Stephen Downing, a victim of one of the longest-known miscarriages of justice, said he was issued with a D-notice when editor of the Bury Messenger. He had been given a file by Castle, by then an MEP, which had details of a Home Office investigation into allegations made by the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens of the existence of a Westminster paedophile ring. The files contained the name of 16 MPs said to be involved and another 40 who were supportive of the goals of the Paedophile Information Exchange, which sought to reduce the age of consent.

Hale said he asked the Home Office for guidance on the dossier and the progress of the investigation but was stonewalled.

Hale said: “Then shortly after Cyril Smith bullied his way into my office. I thought he was going to punch me. He was sweating and aggressive and wanted to take the files away, saying it was a load of nonsense and that Barbara Castle just had a bee in her bonnet about homosexuals. I refused to give him the files.

“The very next day two non-uniformed officers, about 15 uniformed officers and another non-uniformed person, who didn’t introduce himself, came to the office waving a D-notice and said that I would be damaging national security if I reported on the file.”

A spokesman for the D-notice system said: “If Don Hale was ‘served’ with anything purporting to be a ‘D-notice’, it was quite obviously a fabrication.”

And it seems there has been some revision of the historical records:

Now it has emerged that these claims are impossible to verify or discount because the D-notice archives for that period “are not complete”.

Officials running the D-notice system, which works closely with MI5 and MI6 and the Ministry of Defence, said that files “going back beyond 20 years are not complete because files are reviewed and correspondence of a routine nature with no historical significance destroyed”.

The spokesman added: “I cannot believe that past D-notice secretaries would have countenanced the destruction of any key documents. I can only repeat that while any attempted cover-up of this incident might have been attributed to a D-notice the truth would be that it was not.”

Theresa May, home secretary, this month told the Commons that an official review into whether there had been a cover-up of the Home Office’s handling of child-abuse allegations in the 1980s had returned a verdict of “not proven”. The review, by Peter Wanless, the chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, was prompted by the discovery that 114 Home Office files related to child abuse in the 1980s had gone missing.

So a cover-up is “not proven” and authorities associated with the missing documents insist that “it was not” related to a cover-up.

With the death of U.K. celebrity Jimmy Savile, so that he can no longer confess his own crimes or implicate his associates, we are left to wonder what exactly has been done in secret in the past decades. With the recent news about Bill Cosby finally coming to light, I think we need to realize that there may be a great deal of ugliness and exploitation hiding beneath the glitter of the sixties’ “sexual revolution.”